@Diest TKO,
OK, Diest, you are in major trouble!
I read the whole damn thing and it took more time than I actually have.
It got better after 117. Main thing that got better was that shortly after that, Faye stopped being "cute attractive object of affections" (which she
was for that first stretch) and started being "dangerously messed up."
I don't mean the sob-story revelation, that seemed forced. (I think the cartoonist was going in a different direction with the whole "don't touch me" thing and then got a little scared about implications.) Plus Faye tells a story about her dad early on that doesn't jibe with the later revelation.
I just mean that everyone in the strip started to view her as dangerously messed up and someone who needed to work on her issues, which I preferred to "aw how cute."
OK so more general thoughts:
- FRIENDS FRIENDS FRIENDS FRIENDS. So derivative! Maybe subconscious. Alluded to at least once. Everyone living in the same house, long-simmering but unconsummated romance, coffeehouse as home away from home. Raven is Phoebe all the way. Steve is Joey. Other characters are a bit more mix and match. (Marten is sort of the lovechild of Ross and Chandler without the corporateness and with more esoteric taste in music.)
- Predictable plotlines BUT a good job of pulling you in anyway.
- I read the most recent strip first, then the archives (the order of your links). The artistic style was so different, and Sven wasn't around at the beginning, so as I was piecing together characters etc at the beginning, I thought that the characters in the "I cheated" strip were Marten and Faye, which meant that Marten and Faye got together and Marten cheated on her, after all that history. I was happy to get up to the present and find out that it was actually Sven.
- The newsposts are kind of entertaining, all those mentions of Cristi and then they're engaged and then they're married.
- I've mentioned "Friends," "Dykes to Watch Out For," etc., but the other obvious analogue/ forerunner/source is "Doonesbury." The characters were all young when it started out.
In sum, I don't think it's GREAT but it was entertaining and grabby enough that now I'm gonna have to see what happens with them from now on, sigh.